Dissonance has several meanings, all related to conflict or incongruity:
- Consonance and dissonance in music are properties of an interval or chord
- Cognitive dissonance is a state of mental conflict
- Dissonance in poetry is the deliberate avoidance of assonance, i.e. patterns of repeated vowel sounds. Dissonance in poetry is similar to cacophony and the opposite of euphony.
- Dissonance (album), a 2009 album by Enuff Z'Nuff
- Dissonance (music), the quality of a discord
Famous quotes containing the word dissonance:
“Art knows no happier moment than the opportunity to show the symmetry of an extreme, during that moment of spheric harmony when the dissonance dissolves for the blink of an eye, dissolves into a blissful harmony, when the most extreme opposites, coming together from the greatest alienation, fleetingly touch with lips of the word and of love.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“English audiences of working people are like an instrument that responds to the player. Thought ripples up and down them, and if in some heart the speaker strikes a dissonance there is a swift answer. Always the voice speaks from gallery or pit, the terrible voice which detaches itself in every English crowd, full of caustic wit, full of irony or, maybe, approval.”
—Mary Heaton Vorse (1874–1966)
“That, of course, was the thing about the fifties with all their patina of familial bliss: A lot of the memories were not happy, not mine, not my friends’. That’s probably why the myth so endures, because of the dissonance in our lives between what actually went on at home and what went on up there on those TV screens where we were allegedly seeing ourselves reflected back.”
—Anne Taylor Fleming (20th century)